A Personal Blog of Another Insignificant Human

Tag: Life

If you walked in today, I would pass you a quick cup of coffee. I have some roast and ground Robusta filtered at my desk, waiting to be made into a drink. Excuse me, if it’s not too great and I seem hurried, because I am. So if we were having coffee, it would probably be a bit short and quiet, because I would be too engrossed visulaising the explosion of ideas inside my head, that is all courtesy of Inktober 2016. Hail, Jake Parker, hail! Inspirations, come and go. But Inktober churns that inspiration into a motivated effort, and that so effortlessly (at least on your first day!). After long, I did so much in my sketchbook today, needless to say, it felt great. I am not sharing them all, as most were sort of brushing up (pun intended).

Inspirations, come and go. But Inktober churns that inspiration into a motivated effort.

So, it’s evident I just started today. And the prompt for today was – noisy. After chucking a couple of concepts, I did a quick illustration and had it captioned “When one gets a bone, the others get noisy”.

So, I will try and keep up with Inktober the coming week, and hopefully when I see you next weekend, I will share an illustraion for each day to come until then. And I would love to see if any of you give Inktober a shot. (Please do. You’ll be glad you did. It personally gave me a dopamine surge today!)

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So it is weekend again, and I am happy because I feel better about myself. I am not where I wish to be or where I was supposed to be, but I am ahead of where I was yesterday. It’s not reason enough to celebrate but it is reason enough to smile. And wherever one might be in life, there’s always enough reason to ramble over a beverage of one’s choice! And this week I am offering my spin-off Americano.

I am not where I wish to be or where I was supposed to be, but I am ahead of where I was yesterday.

It was on Saturday evening that I wrote the above bit and shut my laptop. Then I laid down, fiddling with a mirror, trying to see my impacted third molar which was troubling me all afternoon. The pain had scaled up from mild to medium, and all I could think of was my tooth! I was restless and so was my tongue which moved all around the buccal cavity, and soon it was bruised with contacts from the premolars and canines. And then I stopped. But the tongue was relentless until I called it a day. (You perv, don’t read much into it!)

Rewind to Thursday. It was Rama-Navami. And I accompanied my mother to a Homa hosted on the banks of river Kosi. Unlike most Homas, there was no priest. People had their own troughs. And simultaneously fire was consecrated in each, invocations were offered to deities, followed by chanting of mantras, and some exhilarating kirtan. It is believed to facilitate positive thinking, and subsequently performing good karma. The ambience was serene; it brought about a sense of much needed calm, and positivity.

Then it was Friday, I wanted to watch something. I hadn’t watched anything in months, and I wanted to watch something that makes me feel good – not something that demands seriousness or/and leaves me disturbed at the end; neither did I want some lame lewd comedy. And I tell you, the Universe is at work! Like the time when I was gifted ‘Furiously Happy’ and it was what I needed to read the most; just like that I found the movie I needed to watch the most at this point of time! So I was rummaging through my cinema library on the external drive, and there it was – the first movie I considered out of the 750+ entries – ‘It’s Kind of a Funny Story’. And it was so befitting – it felt as if it was my story, except I am still trying to bounce up. Craig was much resilient though. Nonetheless, it was assurance that I am not alone and ‘I (too) can’. Also reaffirming was when Dr. Minerva, an ER psychiatrist refers to the Serenity Prayer while counselling our protagonist Craig, and it felt like through Minerva and Craig, the Universe is reaching out to me, telling me to keep calm, to let go of my anxiety.

Lord, grant me the strength to change the things I can
the courage to accept the things I can’t,
and the wisdom to know the difference.~ Reinhold Niebuhr

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So, if were having coffee, I would keep it short this weekend, as I didn’t have a great start to this week that’s going by. I am running far behind my schedule, as I was struggling with drawing certain scenes for my graphic narrative project. I have been trying to make up for that over the weekend so that on Monday I have lesser backlog to clear. Hopefully I can send out the complete draft to my guide soon.

Anyway, after all this explanation I would ask you if iced coffee sounds good, because I am having that. And if you’re abstaining from coffee, I could offer you some fresh juice – a blend of oranges and grapes would be delicious, if you please or would you like some Lemonade instead? OR if you don’t mind some extra calories, I could also make you a refreshing tall glass of Lassi – and that my friends, will be a treat to your taste-buds. And if you’re wondering why I am not offering tea or a hot cup of coffee, it’s because it’s unbearably hot here.

And then, I would ask you, “How’s summer treating you?” And if you said, “Oh I live in the Southern Hemisphere! It’s winter out here…” I would spasmodically interrupt and say “Can we trade lives?” And then, I would calm down and let you speak. Continue reading →

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If we were having coffee, I would tell you, if we were to have coffee last weekend – you would probably be disappointed in me, I would not have shown up. Curled up or strewn, I would be passively lying in bed or on the floor. But about previous weeks I would put aside at that, and I would only tell you about the week that just went by; about how uplifting it feels to be able to sit at your desk for longer, to have some mental block removed, to be able to translate your thoughts and mental images to pencil sketches, to be able to finish drawing frames with far more clarity than one had in months or a year probably.

And I would ask you how do you like your coffee? If you had come over, nonetheless I would make you Indian filter coffee, and show you how Indians traditionally drank coffee. But were we to go out, I would order an espresso or maybe an iced latté depending on my mood. (And I would secretly wonder about your tastes if you ordered a cappuccino!)

Also I would ask what book are you currently reading? And then I would tell you about this book I recently finished reading called ‘Furiously Happy’ by Jenny Lawson‘The Bloggess’. I would not have personally bought the book myself, because I didn’t even know about it. Thanks to Bavitha, one of my friend’s cousin who sent me this for Christmas, I found just the book I needed to read – one in which I found I wasn’t alone in my struggle, one in which I found someone who was facing same set of problems like me (besides many which could be hers alone, I’m sure, or shared by other human specimens I don’t know of!). And it was relieving. I remember one of my teachers telling me last year that my problem is I don’t read humour. And he was right. He said,

“…humour heals.”

And I would tell you what a sweet pleasure is night time reading, just after you have retired to bed and right before you call it a day. It feels like a reward unlike when one takes temporary refuge in them to escape from one’s situation – one’s own insufficiency to make life better. By the way, I am currently reading The Girl at the Lion D’Or by Sebastian Faulks, and it’s quite an interesting read. And I would have our coffees refilled and I would tell you to brace yourself because I am going to talk about something very serious now. Continue reading →